Blogs

Despite the improvements made each year by GNU/Linux, KDE, and GNOME, recovering from failure is one of the recurring themes many new users struggle with. Why aren't we making it easier to prepare for, and recover from, failure? Here are some proposals to make recovery less painful.

The RSS feeds for the Linux App Finder News and Blog sections are currently partial only. I'm trying to determine if I should switch them to contain the full text of the posts instead. Please vote and/or leave your comments if you have a preference that you would like to see adopted.

I'm a Kubuntu user and I ran into a situation recently where the app I wanted to install only came in an RPM. I've run into this situation before and always have to remember alien's syntax so I can install the RPM from Konsole. Kubuntu has a menu where I can right-click a DEB file in Konqueror to install it, so why not RPM's? Once I got bored of gripping I decided to create my own.

I've been a VMware Player user since it was first released, but I recently decided to switch to VMware Server when I found out that it supports dual processors and snapshots. To my dismay I frequently experienced mouse lag, slow graphics, and keyboard sticking. Switching back to VMware Player resolved my issues and was noticeably faster. Has anyone else seen a performance difference between the two?

Repair and recovery tools continue to be difficult for inexperienced, and often experienced, users. Most top distros come with a Live CD that allow you to boot into a desktop and also install from it. That's great, but it should be just as easy to repair an existing installation. Unfortunately it's not so easy.

Following my comparisons between OpenOffice.org Calc, KSpread, and Gnumeric I got to wondering what spreadsheets are the most popular for all you other GNU/Linux users. I started a poll that you can find here. Promote your favorite and vote.

Options include OpenOffice.org Calc, KSpread, Gnumeric, Excel through Wine/Crossover/Virtual Machine, PlanMaker, FlyCalc, Google Spreadsheet, Oleo, and SC. Of course you can also vote for Other and write-in your choice.

I have noticed that mention of Linux on the desktop seems to be building in the media, but it hasn't been clear if that noise correlated to more users actually switching to it. Based on the results of my admittedly unscientific poll, Linux does appear to be building momentum.

Keep is the second entry in my Backing Up series. It is a lightweight app that makes it simple to create and manage multiple backups. At first glance Keep's feature set looks very solid, but when trying it out I quickly discovered some limitations that really limit its potential.